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- El Paso Mayor Dee Margo told Business Insider he’s struggling “walk that tight wire” between public health and ensuring small businesses don’t go under during the pandemic.
- At least 26,000 people in El Paso currently have COVID-19, with over 1,000 in the hospital.
- Margo, a Republican, was an early proponent of masks but has been hesitant to shut down non-essential businesses during the latest surge.
- “I recognize that there are physical deaths as a result of this pandemic, and physical hurt with families and others,” Margo said. “But there also are financial deaths that are occurring.”
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Dee Margo is the mayor of a city in crisis. Over 26,000 people in El Paso, a border city of some 680,000 in Texas, currently have COVID-19, a thousand of them are in the hospital. Fourteen people were reported dead on Wednesday alone, 696 since the pandemic began. The surge in fatalities is outstripping the city’s ability to store the bodies; it now has 10 mobile morgues — air-conditioned trucks — to prevent corpses from decaying.
“I wish I were omnipotent — to be able to know what to do and how to do it,” Margo, a Republican facing an upcoming runoff election, told Business Insider on Wednesday.
Unlike some in his party, Margo was an early advocate of masks, pushing back against Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and his since-rescinded prohibition on local mandates. But he does share the reticence to shutter businesses.
—City of El Paso (@ElPasoTXGov) November 11, 2020
Last month, an El Paso County judge, Ricardo Samaniego attempted to force such closures, issuing a two-week shutdown order for all non-essential businesses, from gyms to tattoo parlors, and limit restaurants to take-out and delivery. Samaniego extended that order Wednesday.
Margo’s administration at first declined to enforce the order, which faces an ongoing legal challenge from a group of El Paso restaurants and the Texas attorney general. Uncertainty reigned, El Paso’s restaurants continuing to serve diners and, per the city’s contact-tracing program, contributed to the spread of the coronavirus.
“Huge, huge confusion,” Laura Rayborn, a local spa owner, told The New York Times. “The mayor went on the radio and on TV and said, ‘Stay open.”
“We were between a rock and a hard place, legally,” Margo argued, citing Gov. Abbott’s own executive order limiting the ability of local jurisdictions to impose lockdowns. A district court later upheld the judge’s order and, on Nov. 6, El Paso police began enforcing it. It is the most stringent set of restrictions since April, when the city lifted a stay-at-home order.
The law was not Margo’s only consideration. He knows that bars — and bars adding food trucks so they can evade the city’s public health edicts and stay open as restaurants — contribute to the spread of the coronavirus. Indoor dining, too: in October, Margo limited dining establishments to carry out after 9:00 p.m., reducing the maximum occupancy to 50% before that.
“When you drink alcohol, your guard goes down and people drop their protections,” Margo said. That was the thinking that informed the restrictions. However, “what we found is that people were leaving the bars after 9:00 p.m., but they weren’t going home. They were congregating in other homes together or other locations together.” Over half of positive COVID-19 cases in El Paso are people between the ages of 20 to 39. “That’s still a behavioral issue that’s a problem.”
Shopping, too, is to blame for the spread: Contact-tracing has revealed that one of the top apparent sources of infection are big-box retailers — Walmart, Target, and the like — where extended families walk the aisles in search of bargains.
Ideally, perhaps, these places would be limited to delivery or curbside pickup too. The status quo of doing just enough to arrest the spread of the virus, but not enough to stamp it out, has meant states and cities across the country, red and blue, have seen progress followed by another surge.
“I recognize that there are physical deaths as a result of this pandemic, and physical hurt with families and others,” Margo said. “But there also are financial deaths that are occurring.”
PAUL RATJE/AFP via Getty Images
A quarter of El Paso’s small businesses have shut down since March. “They’re not underground. They’re not waiting to resurface. They’re gone,” Margo said. “We have 32,000 under unemployment, and we have 148,000 people being fed by our food bank. So there is a balance to this. And all I’ve been trying to do is walk that tight wire.”
Shutdowns are, to be sure, a last resort — a hammer that’s brought down when a virus is out of control. They might not prevent individual bad behavior, or entire families behaving irresponsibly, but they would, at a time when cities are resorting to morgues on wheels, arrest the spread of a deadly virus. In the long run, temporary pain could also mean long-term economic gain, putting an end to the stop-and-start pattern that’s now repeating for a third time.
Provided, of course, that there was a coherent and consistent federal response. No city is an island, and even those with the strictest responses to the pandemic have been unable to stave off a resurgence in the absence of a coherent federal plan.
A second stimulus has been stalled in Congress for months. Democrats have been calling for a comprehensive package, including $1,200 checks, money for state and local governments, and billions more in funding for small business loans, and passed such a measure in May. Senate Republicans, however, have balked at the price tag, with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell putting a new stimulus on the backburner while the chamber confirmed Supreme Court Justice Amy Comey Barrett.
Trump administration, meanwhile, has veered between calls to cut off negotiations on a new stimulus deal and to “go big” — too big, even, for conservatives in Congress.
“If you had the financial support that we had at the beginning…. then yeah, that’s fine. People can still put food on the table and they still can pay their rent and the businesses can get by,” Margo said. “But without that, then it’s a morality play. And that bothers me.” Without that financial support — grants for small businesses and stimulus checks for their patrons — the result is that both the economy and public health suffers.
“We need more help,” Margo told Business Insider. “We continue to need more help.”
Have a news tip? Email this reporter: cdavis@insider.com
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